


cathedral

by pentaghastly



Series: iserill lavellan [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 12:53:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3068690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/pseuds/pentaghastly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(<em>Days</em>, and she stops keeping track of them after that, lets them blur into one indiscernible heap, tracks the passage in time by the number of heartbeats since his last breath).</p><p>Her, years.</p><p>Him...days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cathedral

> “But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway."
> 
> -Raymond Carver

This is not -

This is - 

This is _wrong_.

It is a weak word, formulaic, precise and scientific as if solving a maths problem - _incorrect, erroneous, fallacious, wrong_ \- but as she holds the hand of Commander, lover, husband, father, friend, it is as accurate as any word can be; as accurate as any word _will_ be, expansive vocabulary finding itself at the very bottom of her extensive list of concerns. Lavellan had been, in her youth, a woman eloquent with her words, had spun tales like silk as masterfully as the greatest Orlesian tailor, had caused entire empires to fall to their knees with a speech, a wink, a smile.

Sharp eyes focus on the rise and fall of his chest - in, out, and too long inbetween - and she wonders if there is a word powerful enough to reverse the sands of time.

“How long?” Is that her voice which she hears, is that her who speaks? She does not know, but thinks it must be - only three stand in the room, doctor, patient, and the skeleton she has become - but the sound is foreign to her own ears. Strained, tortured, _wrong_ , and there is that blighted word again that will not cease to haunt her every waking moment. It is wrong, everything is wrong, this is - 

“Days, Your Worship. At most.”

Days.

She does not cry - Lavellan cannot remember the last time she had allowed herself to, does not wish to think on the moment - but she does grip his hand tighter, tries her hardest not to scream and yell and throw fit when Cullen grins up at her - that stupid, _foolish_ smile, as wide and bright and blinding as it was the very day she met him, and she hates him, hates him for what he is, hates _herself_ even more for being weak enough to fall in love with a human when she knew that this would happen all along, had always known.

Her, years.

Him...days.

“Just promise me one thing, my love,” he rasps, voice rough from disuse but still enough to make her weak in the knees, make her free hand quiver as she brushes a silver lock from his brow. “Promise me...that you will not let them dress me in any of those hideous burial robes which the Chantry is so fond of.”

She cannot help it - she laughs, laughs like a little da’len, like the possessed, like the madwoman which she surely is, and he is still for a moment before he joins her, and if the healer thinks that they’ve lost their mind well, chances are he may be correct.

\---

Contrary to popular gossip, marriage did, in fact, come before child.

Well, it was _supposed_ to.

They had been engaged less than a week (matching tattoos instead of rings, and if he cried like an infant when he received his, neither of them will ever tell) when Lavellan began to notice the signs, notice the barrels of food shoveled back at each meal, on occasion surpassing even Bull, notice the mass of bizarre cravings - notice her craving for _him_ , jumping her lover in dim-lit corridors at any hour of the day without warning. Typically she knows he would not complain, but when she tries to tear his trousers off in the middle of a war council meeting with all advisors present, they both begin to suspect there may be other things at work.

Blood magic, perhaps? Possession? She spends half her days with her face inside of her chamber pot and finds herself wishing that such were the case.

Demons, she could deal with. Demons she _understood_ , could master with a flick of her wrist and a few spurts of fire and ice. Children were...not her area, not something she had ever foreseen in her future - with her clan she had avoided the da’len like the blight, kept herself far away from their sticky fingers and their prying hands and their eyes that knew so much, _too_ much for them to be so new to the world. They did not scare her - she had faced down dragons and demons and ancient darkspawn, and despite Dorian's teasing words she was _not_ frightened of yet undeveloped people and their unnervingly small hands.

And what about her suggested that she might know how to raise a child? The vallaslin on her face, the sharp point of her ears, the magic that ran through her veins, the glowing green tear on her hand? She was death, she was _danger_ , she was destruction incarnate. She was not...she could not…

“I can’t do this, Cullen.”

She could not bring herself look at him, was to weak to even try, but she could hear him perfectly fine, hear him laugh from his perch on their bed not feet away from where she stood. How could he be _laughing_? They were having a child - she, a Dalish apostate and he, an ex-Templar and recovering addict - and he was laughing?

“Would you shut up!” Sharp, demanding, her voice cut through his like a knife, and now she shifted her gaze - silent, finally, but still amused, he stared at her as if she were telling a long-winded joke rather than seconds away from burning the castle to ash, and him along with it. “I can’t do this, I _cannot_ , and you know as much! What would we do, ma vhenan? Would we take our child alongside us to fight demons? Bring her to Orlais at the next threat of Civil War? Do I hold her in my arms when I sentence a man to death, or shall that be your honour?"

She froze, cast her eyes to the stone of the floor - rough, cold against the pads of her feet, she wondered if their child would feel more comfortable in Skyhold’s towering walls than they would in the forest from which she came. “I don’t...I don’t _deserve_ this, Cullen. I’ll ruin them.”

It takes her a heartbeat to notice he’s walked towards her, that he’s holding her to his chest, so gently it is as if he fears she might break apart in his arms. It takes her longer to notice she is crying ( _and there it is, the last time she had shed a tear. She knew it had been over something important_ ).

“We will love them, with everything that we have.” Is she shaking, or is that him? Perhaps they both are; he presses a delicate kiss to her forehead and his lips tremble against her skin like a butterfly’s wings, her hands quiver with a weakness only he is permitted to see as they grasp the fabric of his shirt, grasp it with a desperation she has never known. “And you will be as a mother as you are in everything else - unfairly amazing.”

It takes her a heartbeat to notice she’s laughing. It takes her longer to notice he is too.

\---

“Mamae? I brought you tea.”

She had not heard Deshanna approach - unnervingly quiet, her daughter had always been, her Elven blood making her too light on her feet to be the shem she was often mistaken for - but to be fair she did not hear much any longer, save for the steady beat of his heart, the even pattern of his breath, growing slower with each passing hour. How long has it been, since she left his side? The sun has come and gone; she wonders how many more times they will share the sunrise together.

Nimble fingers weave their way through her hair from behind her, tracing patterns like vallaslin on her skull - she tenses for a moment, then relaxes back into her daughter’s loving touch, flutters her eyes shut in the hopes that he will not slip away from her while her gaze is averted. Deshanna’s hands are soft, smooth and unlined; half-elf, but age has kept a steady distance as if it were Dalish blood alone that ran through her veins. For this Lavellan is grateful, but she wonders if for the young woman’s human wife she might be able to say the same.

Of all her legacies, that was not the one she wished to pass on.

“You need to rest, Mamae. Daddy was always stubborn - you and I both know he is not going anywhere soon, not without letting us know first.” _Do they?_ She nearly argues, but stops herself when she hears the desperate hope in her daughter’s voice, finally takes notice of the way her touch is too tough to be tender, too urgent to be soothing.

They all grieve in their own ways. She, in her silence; Deshanna, in her faith.

She reaches above her head, grips her child’s hand in her own - it feels like comfort, it feels like _home_ , and she hopes that her daughter loves her own children this much, loves them so fully, so vastly, that simply holding them feels as if the world has been righted, as righted as it may ever get.

\---

It still shocked her, on occasion, the ferocity with which she loved him.

Half a century he had been in this world, a decade and a half in hers, and she did not dare to think of what a dark and dismal place it may be were he to no longer be a part of it. He smiled at her, she forgot to breathe; he laughed, her heart skipped a beat; he kissed her, she could not remember the feel of anything else except his lips. 

They were parents, middle-aged, _respectable_ , and yet they continued to lust after one another like teenagers. 

And perhaps it was true that, when they made love, it was not with the vigor of their youth - he no longer took her in the middle of abandoned castle corridors, hard and fast and needy and filled with an energy neither possessed in their advancing age. Perhaps they did not pull each other’s hair or claw at each other’s backs or bite each other’s tender flesh if only to leave their mark, to stake their claim on one another (if it were not already clear enough in their heated glances, tender words, hushed whispers).

But what it lacked in youthful passion it made up for in tender love, a love unlike any she had ever known to be possible. It was the thing of storybooks, Varric often told her, a fucking miracle, and although she rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue she thought, perhaps, he may be onto something.

Calloused hands touched her with a reverence typically reserved for the worship of a god, a skillful tongue tasted her as if she were the last drink of water in a world on fire, golden eyes bore into her with every thrust, with every needy gasp and hushed plea - she wondered what he searched for within them, wondered if he ever found it, but if he was less than satisfied with the results he gave her no indication. He sought out her lips, met them with his own - not with a clash, but with a sigh; not to start a war, but simply to find one another, to follow the path on which the other took them and find their way home.

They would lie together, afterwards, bodies sticky with sweat, his softening with age, her loving him more and more as it did; he would connect her freckles like the stars in an astrarium, she would trace patterns in his skin to match the tattoos on her face. 

“Ma vhenan,” Lavellan would tell him, half-asleep, half in a state of blissful peace that she had never imagined possible outside the fade. “When you leave this world, you must promise me something.” Silence - listening, but waiting. Her words did not need an answer, for the both knew that whatever she asked, he would do. “When you leave me, an immeasurable number of years from now I should hope, you must promise me that wherever you go you will take me with you. I don’t want to have to learn the world outside of your arms.”

His response was immediate, unthinking. “Of course, so long as you swear the same. There is no point of an afterlife if you are not there beside me.”

Lips met in silent oath - this final vow she knew neither of them would break.

\---

He promised.

He _failed_.

The sun fades on the second day and he along with it - “days,” the healer had said, and she had not thought he meant quite so literally, no less than one, no more than two. _Days_ , and she stops keeping track of them after that, lets them blur into one indiscernible heap, tracks the passage in time by the number of heartbeats since his last breath.

She cries, then. Deshanna holds her in her arms, holds herself in stoic quiet - they all grieve in their own ways.

They spare him the robes but give him a pyre - Lavellan hates it, and plants a tree in Skyhold’s garden, her own silent protest.

Deshanna leaves, as she was always meant to do, but not without protest. She thinks of Denerim, of a human woman sitting in wait for her love to return, thinks of that woman’s life shortening with every breath, thinks of their time together cut a touch smaller with every moment her daughter remained at her side - she thinks and she sends her daughter away with a fierce hug and a vow that she will visit, once her mourning is complete.

If they both know it is a lie, they are each too craven to say.

She has learned the world outside his arms. It is cold, empty - 

It is _wrong_.

\---

They lay facing towards each other under a tent of white cotton sheets - close, but not enough to touch, palms spread towards one another so that if either shifted, even just a breath, they would meet. It is a game of sorts, one they play often, of who can keep their distance, who can resist the other’s smile for a moment longer. 

He grins, she lets out a giggle she did not know she had been holding - pinkies brush and they freeze, each looking like the cat who got the cream. Just a moment and the world is still, silent, as if it waits captivated, in breathless anticipation along with them; a bird chirps outside their window, and then it collapses into nothing but a tangle of sheets and limbs and whispered “ _I love you_ ”’s muffled by skin and lips and sighs. 

Each time, they call it a tie.

**Author's Note:**

> this was kinda inspired by a (much longer) fic I wrote for Fenris & Hawke, because apparently I like making myself really, really depressed. comments & kudos are much appreciated xx :)


End file.
